How Much Time Do You Waste On Basic Computer Repairs
from the too-much dept
Someone who prefers to remain anonymous, sent in a link to Marshall Brain's attempt to track how much time he spent dealing with computer problems in the month of December. There's nothing out of the ordinary in there. As the anonymous submitter states: "He had 21 documented problems. He's got everything we all normally experience -- driver problems, software problems, crashed apps, etc. He simply tracked it all for one month and came up with a total of over 11 hours in wasted time!" Sounds about right, unfortunately. Speaking of which, I just spent a good twenty minutes troubleshooting a finicky wireless router.
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Well...
Is everyones 'Cup Holder' still working?
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Can I turn this into another Windows vs Linux thin
Apart from that, I had to do a kernel upgrade and a couple package upgrades when some vulnerabilities showed up. Between ordering the replacement drives, installing them, and running dselect to fetch the upgrades, I'd wager I spent about 45 minutes this year on problems between nine machines.
I probably spend about another couple hours a month troubleshooting packages on the Debian testing/unstable box, but that's because I'm explicitly testing things there and filing bugs upstream. That's not a production machine, it's a testing machine.
My Windows XP machine at work needs attention monthly. Visual Studio .NET just stops loading, the automatic update service starts trying to reinstall the same patch daily, things freeze up, service packs break applications, performance degrades whenever the machine's up for more than a week at a time and the display starts losing track of which icon should get drawn where, one of the multi heads starts going into power saving mode until rebooting, file associations revert to unwanted applications, drives turn up full because Windows has been caching Windows Update downloads on random drives, Outlook locks up for extended periods, builds corrupt and project working folders need to be purged and full rebuilds need to be done, on and on. I think I can conservatively say that Windows screwiness costs me half an hour per day, or about 12 hours per month.
So my one Windows machine costs about 192 times as much maintenance time as my cluster of nine Debian boxes. The home machines are on 24/7, and I use the two Debian desktop boxes and the one Debian movie and music server about as much as I use the Windows machine at work.
Or put another way, the one Windows machine costs about 6 times as much time as the Debian machine where I intentionally run untested software to try and help find problems.
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I don't know
And that doesn't include the time I wasted yesterday figuring out that the wife's car's timing belt was broke. 4 years old. Grrrrrrrr. My 14 yo Marquis hasn't had as much down time as that damn Saturn!
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Re: I don't know
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